Nasim has returned to Iran soon after the events in , to be part of the change, and now works at the popular virtual world Zendegi, a Second Life on steroids powered by very realistic virtual reality technology. It is interesting that Zendegi is a local company, and their main competitor is an Indian company.
Not that I had any doubts, but seeing a good science fiction novel set in a country currently demonized by the media is refreshing. Zendegi has financial problems and is losing market share to its competitors. Nasim realizes that her old colleagues at the Human Connectome Project have achieved important advances and released a large database of high resolution brain scans of thousands of volunteers. Nasim understands that these advances may permit developing better technology for Zendegi, and she turns to her old connection Nate Caplan for funding.
Egan has been accused of being mainly an epic writer who under-develops his characters. It is not always so, for example Martin and Nasim are real persons, like many characters in other novels such as Teranesia, but Caplan is really a fake in black and white: I have met some monomaniac transhumanists with an inflated opinion of their intelligence and worth, but Caplan is far too extreme for a believable character. He wants to achieve personal transcendence through uploading, and sees their schemes as conflicting with his.
Martin does this only for his son, and he does not really believe that he may actually continue to live in Zendegi, or at least he never says so. Nasim and Martin do not see their sideloading project as a means to actually preserve Martin beyond physical death, and only want to build a credible emulation for Javeed. But Caplan supports the project because he sees sideloading as a precursor of uploading and personal cybernetic immortality. I should not give spoilers here, but you have probably guessed that this story does not have a happy ending.
The project has failed, and sideloading technology is not yet good enough to permit preserving people after death. Even though the Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project has not produced any result, their premises in Houston have been bombed by terrorists. Perhaps because the publicity given to other sideloading projects at Zendegi more limited in scope but more successful has made people realize that these projects may actually produce results, and somebody perhaps Caplan himself has wanted to cripple them.
The tragic end is already expected by the reader and does not come as a surprise.
Egan knows that the development of disruptive technologies is never easy, never linear, and always troubled. I think uploading technology will be developed eventually, perhaps in the second half of this century, but I am afraid Greg is right, and in the early development stages there will be unexpected problems and major setbacks, there will be unhappiness, and there will be tragedies.
And, in fact, the novel ends with a positive thought: Whether or not that proved to be possible, it was a noble aspiration. Extropia DaSilva February 5, , Anyway, about the uploading debate. I see two flawed assumptions exhibited by its skeptics. Imagine it was , a time when computers used vacuum tubes.
I have no doubt that such a prediction would meet with criticisms, explaining how the physics of vacuum tubes renders this idea utterly impossible. But, introduce the new paradigm of computational systems based on integrated ciruits, and such laptops are perfectly feasible. But consider one of the hopes of Henry Markram: So what about downloading the mind to a neuromorphic device, a design based on a comprehensive understanding of cognitive functions? And then you can imagine gradually replacing everything except the brain. Or consider phantom limb syndrome, in which an amputee feels the presence of a limb located in a particular position in space and, in some cases, can move their phantom limb , even though the limb does not exist.
What does exist, is the parts of the brain that used to receive stimulation from the sense organs that were in that limb. So what about a brain-in-a-jar, provided with all the stimulation and perceptions it would receive from an actual body, including tricking the visual cortex into seeing a body moving around in accord to free will? I mean, sometimes when you dream you are inhabiting a body while unaware of your real body lying on the bed, so it seems possible.. The brain is the most complex thing in the known universe.
It therefore seems highly unlikely that any people technologically-advanced enough to create neuromorphic devices capable of running uploaded minds could not also provide that mind with an artificial body or a full phantom body for when that person wants to enter full sensory VR. It is the notion that the mind requires a physical body. I also believe some people go further and insist my brain requires MY body meaning an artificial body, even if it provided full sensory experience, would feel alien to that mind. I was trying to show why these assumptions are not true.
Nov 20, Alan rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Ian McDonald fans and cultural imperialists. Greg Egan 's foray into near-future science fiction feels like a departure of sorts; his gaze has been focused on much farther horizons of late. But I think this change of pace has turned out to be a really good thing; Zendegi is a taut, plausible future history which, even if it does turn out to be overtaken by events, still partakes of the best of hard sf—rigorous extrapolation from what is known into the dizzying ramifications of what-if.
Martin Seymour is a journalist who goes to Iran just bef Greg Egan 's foray into near-future science fiction feels like a departure of sorts; his gaze has been focused on much farther horizons of late. Martin Seymour is a journalist who goes to Iran just before a tipping point is reached When we meet him, Martin comes across as a fairly shallow character, obsessing over transferring his vinyl LP collection to electronic format it turns out that his musical taste is, well, let's just say that we'd have a lot of common areas to talk about, he and I.
But he, and Zendegi , get deeper. Martin ends up staying in Iran, at first involuntarily but then by choice. He marries Mahnoosh, runs a bookstore, and has a son named Javeed. Parallel to this runs the story of an expatriate Iranian named Nasim Golestani, whose pioneering work with non-destructively mapping minds leads to her involvement in Zendegi, a virtual reality company with a worldwide network of full-immersion arcades and a consuming need for more realistic non-player characters. She's able to build on her earlier work to create Proxies for Zendegi, snapshots of mental processes which aren't truly sentient but which do convincingly emulate sentience Nasim's success becomes even more significant when Martin finds out he's closer to dying than he ever thought he was.
He wants Nasim to make a Proxy more advanced and complete than anything she's ever done This is an order of magnitude more complex than anything Nasim's done so far; and if she can do it at all, she's not sure she should. Egan's book is a sincere, humanistic tale with complex, believable characters, whose motivations are honest and valid even when they conflict. The science in the book is as rigorous as he could make it. The politics are plausible—even if events in Iran and elsewhere don't turn out anything like these, they could.
And, Egan eventually gets into some deep waters philosophically, musing on the meaning of mind and considering the ethics of creating things like minds and then using them either for fun or profit—even if the things themselves don't seem to mind. Just how human does something have to become before we begin treating it as something worthy of its own autonomy?
Considering how often humans treat other humans as chattel, it's not at all surprising that misgivings about Proxies receive short shrift among the entities that stand to profit from their use. What is surprising, though, is where Egan's considerations take him; it's a much more nuanced position than I would've expected.
Zendegi is something of a return to form for Egan, or at least so it seems to me, a reminder of why I started reading his novels in the first place. In venturing back into the territory of a Bruce Sterling or Ian McDonald , Greg Egan has crafted a tale worth reading—on several levels. Nov 25, Tomislav rated it it was amazing Shelves: I have found much of his work to be more true to the concepts than to the characters, and of course that limits his appeal beyond a select subset of SF readers. Sort of the best of both worlds.
The setting is singular as well. The novel was written in , and set in its beginning in Iran during a slow-building uprising against the theocracy.
Zendegi () - IMDb
Australian journalist Martin Seymour is covering events, and becomes involved with the events leading up to the change of government. There is a very realistic feel to these events as it is not some sort of fantasy conversion to western values, but more a tipping of which group is in charge.
Egan himself traveled from Australia to Iran, at some personal risk, to research the culture and circumstances of contemporary Iran. I understood HCP to be an attempt to build an exact model of a human brain at the level of individual neurons, somewhat akin to the Human Genome Project, but with a significantly larger dataset size. The second setting is 15 years later, in the future Iran that has resulted.
Both Martin and Nasim now reside permanently in Iran, in somewhat changed circumstances. It is enjoyable to discover through reading what has happenend in each of their lives during the intervening years, so I will not spoil it with plot synopsis. I was fascinated to read Egan making extensive use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging fMRI for purposes of identifying brain activation maps of individuals in order to impress something of their personalities into the HCP data set, to create more realistic character proxies in the Zendegi virtual reality space.
He calls the process "side-loading".
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But as a biomedical engineer working in MRI, I did have an issue here. Egan shows that he does understand this, but the problem to me is a matter of scale. The resolution of MRI is on the order of millimeters, and one cubic millimeter contains billions of neurons. I just do not see how the detail necessary to impart specific soccer skills or specific parenting values could be captured. Increasing the power of the scanner by "an order of magnitude" would not really help either, as the blood oxygenation takes place all over an area up to 1 or 2 millimeters from the activation anyway.
Be that as it may, by that point, I was more interested in the fate of the characters and the nature of their experience. Just near the ending are some unexpected plot twists. Others may find them abrupt, but I think some of the reversals are worthy of consideration in the reader's time immediately after finishing.
Realmente, espero otro tipo de historias por parte de Greg Egan.
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Apr 17, Froggy rated it really liked it Shelves: Greg Egan's books usually contain High science fiction, the sort of things that really makes the readers imagination sparkle with the wonder of the ideas they hold. His inclusion of "Wang's carpets" in his book Diaspora, for instance showing how 2 dimensional patterns ever moving on a football field sized map could be extrapolated into complex 3 dimensional beings living in a quite separate reality to the one we observe.
So upon starting to read Zenegi, I had high hopes about advanced intellige Greg Egan's books usually contain High science fiction, the sort of things that really makes the readers imagination sparkle with the wonder of the ideas they hold. So upon starting to read Zenegi, I had high hopes about advanced intelligence being created, Ghosts in the machine, immortality though computer storage. What the story actually is about is the very start of all this and about mans humanity and morality. Set in the middle east, revolving around the life of a western journalist turned native and a westernized native returned home.
The book talks about the rise of technology through game software, and how advanced brain scanning and mapping techniques could bring about the rise of artificial entities. I remember the book ended rather abruptly and I was struck with a disappointing feeling of okay, where is the sc-fi, but then I reflected, this was sc-fi of a gentler, more thoughtful sort, less extreme, but containing ideas that could well lead to the miracles we envisage the future contains.
Nov 04, Raja99 rated it it was amazing Shelves: Why I Read This Book: I'm a big fan of Greg Egan, and had been on my local library's waiting list for the hardcover for about a month before it arrived.
Book Review – Zendegi, by Greg Egan
Then I saw that it'd been added to the Kindle store—and, more to my tastes, Baen's ebook store where it's cheaper, can be downloaded in several formats, and has no DRM. Egan's previous novel, Incandescence , is set in the far future and is somewhat inaccessible as a result. Zendegi has two parts; the former is set in the very near future and is arguably the most accessible and one of the most readable things Egan has done. The second part is set a few decades later; it's slower-paced, but reaches a very satisfactory conclusion.
Aug 20, Ben Payne rated it really liked it. This is a near-future SF novel, set in Iran, dealing with the potential precursors for intelligent AI. It's possibly the most human book I've read of Egan', and certainly one of the most accessible. The science is definitely more background, here, compared to some of his far-future books, and the novel focuses more strongly on character. I've often thought criticism of Egan's characterisation was unfounded; to me he writes very believable, intelligent, three-dimensional characters, and that's ve This is a near-future SF novel, set in Iran, dealing with the potential precursors for intelligent AI.
I've often thought criticism of Egan's characterisation was unfounded; to me he writes very believable, intelligent, three-dimensional characters, and that's very much on display here, as well as an admirable grasp of contemporary and near-future extrapolated contemporary Iran. It's hard to say much about the book without spoiling some of the left-field shifts, but it deals with love, family, death and identity.
There were a few parts where I kind of found it slow going; it might have benefited from a couple more characters in the mix. But overall it was a thoughtful and moving novel. I listened to the Audible version of this book Simplemente no parece que sea Greg Egan. Se ve el desarrollo de este sistema de real Simplemente no parece que sea Greg Egan.
Se ve el desarrollo de este sistema de realidad virtual intercalando narraciones realmente aburridas de juegos que se desarrollan dentro. May 18, Derek rated it really liked it Shelves: When Greg Egan is good, he's great, and this one is a keeper. Intertwining a perfectly believable near-term future of Iran with highly realistic experimentation into artificial intelligence, it covers human and AI rights, life extension, ancient Farsi stories, virtual realities and what it means to be a family; blending it all seamlessly into a touching narrative.
As a computer geek, I'm always eager to read stories about artificial intelligence, and naturally have a pretty high threshold of bel When Greg Egan is good, he's great, and this one is a keeper. As a computer geek, I'm always eager to read stories about artificial intelligence, and naturally have a pretty high threshold of believability for the subject. This story, and especially the ending, has my belief from start to finish. Well-drawn characters; my only real complaint about the book was that the ending felt somewhat abrupt.
Sep 15, Mitchell rated it liked it Shelves: A lot in this one. First of all lots of near future guess of politics in Iran. But it doesn't quite depend on it coming out a particular way. It does make some guesses as to Human Uplift and AI and online virtual games. But when it gets to the virtual game part of the story it slows down to far.
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- Gottsched und Lessing: Zwei Größen der Literaturkritik im 18. Jahrhundert (German Edition).
- Studies in Scripture, vol. 5: The Gospels.
And Martin and his son don't exactly ring true. Still, looking forward to trying another by the author. Oct 26, Robin Edman rated it did not like it. I checked the other reviews, and most people like this book. I freakin' hate it! It's all about Iranian politics, which are boring, boring, boring!
And a lot of morally superior crap, which I hate even more than Iranian politics. It's also not so very science fiction-y; my husband who is a patent lawyer tells me more interesting things than this book imagines. I'm two thirds in and giving up on it. Dec 08, DMS rated it really liked it Shelves: Apr 30, Scott Beck rated it really liked it. I was really confused by this book being near future small scale sci-fi. I was sure it wasn't an Egan book at all but misspelled. Still a good story but I prefer his larger scale stuff. Dec 17, Ryan Lackey rated it it was amazing.
As an audiobook, it's even better, since it's read by a Persian woman; it's cute how she gets all the Farsi words right and then has trouble with some of the more obscure English words. Amusingly, it was written in ; I was going to fault it for being too "of the minute" if it had been written today. Another unusual thing about this book -- it has actual characters with personal problems and you end up caring about them as people, watching their motivations evolve, and remain true to their core principles; it's more like "literature" than genre fiction in a lot of ways. My only criticism of the book is that the end seemed a little rushed, and since Egan doesn't tend to do true sequels, we're never going to see more in this universe.
If someone isn't into sci-fi in general, I'd strongly recommend this book as an introduction. If you're an Egan fan, or a fan of hard sci-fi, it might not be the absolute top book, but it's quite good, and definitely worth reading. Writen in , set in and , read in Writing near future stuff is hard, so it's even more amazing how well he nailed the filter bubble phenomena 2 years before it was even named , and the rise of Fake News.
The story ends abruptly without really picking a side. I assume America in this near future has strapped a jetpack to the continent and blasted off into space. I think it would be less jarring if the story was set in the future democratic North Korea at least that's just one war away from normalcy. I don't mind the focus heavily shifted from sci-fi to the father-son relationship but the whole socio-political story around it was tiresome and the overall saccharin levels made the premise feel more contrived.
Please, more planet consuming AIs, fewer I assume America in this near future has strapped a jetpack to the continent and blasted off into space. Please, more planet consuming AIs, fewer middle-eastern fairy tale markets. Sep 07, Chris Aylott rated it liked it Shelves: Egan's polished story of Iranian culture and unrest makes me wish it wasn't science fiction. By that, I mean I liked the characters and situations, but the science and technology aspects felt like window-dressing.
It was interesting stuff, but I would have been just as happy to read a similar story set in a completely realistic modern-day setting. Egan's books presumably sell more with a genre label, but this didn't need to be a genre book. Oct 02, Paul Sargent rated it it was ok. Jan 06, Scott rated it really liked it. A good read with a thought provoking topic.